The broadcast of Gilligan’s Island aired for the last time on April 17, 1967. The show experienced modest critical reception but maintained strong ratings performance which led everyone to anticipate its return in the following fall with a fourth season. CBS needed to fit Gunsmoke into its programming lineup at the very end since the show was a personal favorite of Babe Paley who served as wife to network president William Paley. The show crew cut Gilligan and left the cast members floating in the Pacific Ocean according to broadcast information.
Gilligan’s Island continued its broadcast run forty-eight years after its original cast members hosted their final wrap party. After syndication distribution the show has continuously aired its replays across 30 different languages throughout the world. Everyone should sit comfortably to listen to stories about these well-loved shipwrecked survivors.
1. IT WAS INTENDED TO BE A “METAPHORICAL SHAMING OF WORLD POLITICS.”
One day in a public speaking class at New York University, the professor had students compose an impromptu one-minute speech on this topic: If you were stranded on a desert island, what one item would you like to have? Sherwood Schwartz was a student in that class, and the question so intrigued him that it remained lodged in the back of his mind for many years.
After working for some time as a comedy writer for other shows, Schwartz decided to pitch his own idea for a sitcom. Thinking back to that desert island question, he thought it would make for an interesting dynamic to have a group of very dissimilar individuals stranded together and have to learn to live and work together. The island would be “a social microcosm and a metaphorical shaming of world politics in the sense that when necessary for survival, yes we can all get along,” Schwartz explained in Inside Gilligan’s Island: From Creation to Syndication. Schwartz quickly discovered after his first few pitch meetings that words like “microcosm” and “metaphor” were not very helpful when trying to sell a comedy.
2. GILLIGAN’S FIRST NAME IS WILLY.
After getting a green light from CBS for the pilot, Schwartz went about assembling his cast. He chose the name of the bumbling first mate—Gilligan—from the Los Angeles telephone directory. Gilligan’s first name was never mentioned during the series, but according to Schwartz’s original notes, it was intended to be “Willy.” Yet Bob Denver always insisted that “Gilligan” was the character’s first name. “Almost every time I see Bob Denver we still argue,” Schwartz once admitted. “He thinks Gilligan is his first name, and I think it’s his last name. Because in the original presentation, it’s Willy Gilligan. But he doesn’t believe it, and he doesn’t want to discuss it. He insists the name is Gilligan.”
3. SCHWARTZ WANTED JERRY VAN DYKE TO PLAY GILLIGAN.
Jerry Van Dyke was Schwartz’s first choice to play the lead, but Van Dyke said that the pilot script was “the worst thing I’d ever read.” On the advice of his agent, Van Dyke accepted the lead in the short-lived (and critically panned) My Mother The Car instead. “I had a lot of problems with the agency, because they were trying to push me into taking [Gilligan’s Island],” Van Dyke recalled in an interview. “But that’s the joke: I turned it down and took My Mother the Car. But, again, it was really good, because I’d [have] been forever known as Gilligan. So that worked out, too!”
4. ALAN HALE GOT TO HIS AUDITION VIA HORSEBACK.
The Skipper was the toughest, and last, character to be cast. Schwartz auditioned dozens of actors (including Carroll O’Connor), but no one was quite right; he wanted someone strong and commanding, sometimes blustery and short-tempered, but able to show a genuine affection for Gilligan even when smacking him over the head with his hat. Alan Hale was filming Bullet for a Bad Man in St. George, Utah when he got the casting call for Gilligan and was unable to get time off for a screen test. So he had to sneak off set after a day of filming, which was no easy task. In Surviving Gilligan’s Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three-Hour Tour in History, it was revealed that Hale made his way to Los Angeles to read a scene with Bob Denver via horseback, hitchhiking, airplane, and taxi cab. He reversed the process after the audition and made it back to Utah just in time to resume filming his western the next day.
5. THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK DELAYED PRODUCTION ON THE SERIES.
The pilot for the series was filmed over several days in November of 1963 on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. The last day of shooting was scheduled for November 23, 1963 in Honolulu Harbor for the scenes showing the S.S. Minnow embarking on its fateful three-hour tour. Late in the morning on November 22, a crew member ran to the set and announced that he’d just heard on the radio that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. As Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President, it was announced that all military installations (including Honolulu Harbor) would be closed for the next two days as a period of mourning. Filming was delayed by several days as a result, and in the opening credits—as the Minnow cruises the harbor—the American flag can be seen flying at half-mast in the background.
6. THE MILLIONAIRE’S WIFE REALLY WAS A MILLIONAIRE.
Natalie Schafer, who played Mrs. Lovey Howell—and allegedly only accepted the invitation to play Mrs. Howell because it meant a free trip to Hawaii to film the pilot—was a real-life millionaire. During her marriage to actor Louis Calhern, the couple had invested heavily in Beverly Hills real estate at a time when a house on Rodeo Drive could be purchased for $50,000.
When she died in 1991, Schafer bequeathed a large chunk of her fortune to her favorite teacup poodle (she had no children), with instructions for that money to be donated to the Motion Picture and Television Hospital after the pooch’s passing. Said hospital now has a “Natalie Schafer Wing.” Rumor has it that Schafer also left a tidy sum to Gilligan’s Island co-star Dawn Wells (Mary Ann), who lived with and helped care for Natalie as she battled breast cancer.
7. DAWN WELLS STILL GETS PAID FOR GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.
All of the actors signed contracts that guaranteed them a certain amount of money per original episode plus a residual payment for the first five repeats of each episode. This was a pretty standard contract in 1965, when as a rule most TV shows were only rerun during the summer months as a placeholder between seasons.
Even though the word “syndication” wasn’t yet a standard term in the TV production glossary, Dawn Wells’ then-husband, talent agent Larry Rosen, advised her to ask for an amendment to that residual clause in her contract, and the producers granted it, never thinking the series would be on the air nearly 50 years later. As a result, the estate of the late Sherwood Schwartz (who reportedly pocketed around $90 million during his lifetime from his little microcosm-on-an-island show) and Dawn Wells are the only two folks connected to the show who still receive money from it.
8. RAQUEL WELCH AUDITIONED FOR MARY ANN.
The programming executives at CBS were underwhelmed by the pilot, but it managed to impress three different test audiences enough that they put the series on the fall schedule. But before filming for the first episode began, they had a few caveats—the first of which was replacing three cast members who had tested the “lowest” with audiences: John Gabriel, who played The Professor, a high school science teacher; Kit Smythe, who played Ginger as a secretary, not a movie star; and Nancy McCarthy, who played Bunny, yet another secretary. It was decided to make Ginger an actress, and Bunny was replaced by wholesome farm girl Mary Ann. One actress who auditioned for Mary Ann’s part was a young Raquel Welch, though something about her just didn’t scream “girl next door.”
9. THE SHOW’S STARS FOUND FANS IN THE STRANGEST PLACES.
Years after the show stopped filming (it’s never really been “off the air”), the cast members found fans in the most unusual places. For example, in 2001 Russell Johnson was asked to speak at a biochemical conference in San Francisco. “There were four or five hundred PhDs there, and every one of them was a Gilligan’s Island fan,” he recalled. Bob Denver took his wife to dinner at Chicago’s elegant Pump Room once and the trio of musicians immediately switched from playing their semi-classical chamber music to “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island.” Dawn Wells was vacationing in the Solomon Islands in 1990 when she and some friends canoed to a remote island in the area that had no running water or electricity. The visitors were ushered to a hut to meet the village chief, and Wells was stunned when “The chief’s wife said, ‘I know you. In 1979, I was going to nursing school in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, and I used to come home and watch you in black-and-white!’”
10. THE SKIPPER BROKE HIS ARM FALLING OUT OF A COCONUT TREE.
Alan Hale was an old-school “the show must go on” kind of actor. In Inside Gilligan’s Island, Schwartz recalled chatting with Hale at the season one wrap party when the actor, as jolly and convivial as always, happened to comment that now that shooting was completed, he could take care of his arm. When Schwartz asked what was wrong with his arm, Hale nonchalantly replied: “Oh, I broke it a few weeks ago.” He went on to explain that three weeks prior he had missed the crash pads slightly when he fell out of a coconut tree for a scene and had smashed his right arm on the stage. He hadn’t sought medical treatment because he didn’t want to disrupt the filming schedule. Schwartz was dumbfounded; “How did you manage to haul coconuts and lift Bob Denver with a broken arm?” “It wasn’t easy,” Hale admitted.
11. NATALIE SCHAFER DID HER OWN STUNTS.
Even though Natalie Schafer was in her mid-60s when Gilligan’s Island was filmed, she insisted on doing the majority of her own stunts—and never complained about jumping into the lagoon or sinking in fake quicksand. In 1965, she told “Let’s Be Beautiful” columnist Arlene Dahl that she kept in shape by swimming in her backyard pool—in the nude—and by periodically following her special “ice cream diet,” which consisted of eating nothing but one quart of ice cream (spread out over three meals) daily. She would lose three pounds in five days following that regime.